The Magazine Advert That Helped Launch Barcelona

· GiveMeSport

Explore how a simple magazine ad sparked the birth of FC Barcelona in 1899.

Before European Cups , before Camp Nou, before they even had a motto, FC Barcelona began as 60-odd words tucked into the back pages of a Barcelona sports weekly.

On 22 October 1899, a young Swiss expatriate placed a modest classified ad asking anyone interested in football to come find him. He had no way of knowing it, but he was about to set the motion for one of the most significant clubs in world sport, a club that would later be home to some of the greatest football players of all time .

That man was Hans Gamper, later known as Joan Gamper , and his advert appeared in a magazine called Los Deportes . It ran with typos, his own name misspelled, and offered nothing more than an invitation to meet on a couple of weeknights. Yet, a little over a month later, it had done exactly what he hoped.

Gamper arrived in Barcelona in 1898, already a committed footballer from Switzerland, and quickly noticed a problem. The city had no organised football scene and no proper pitches to speak of. His first attempt to fix that fell flat, as Jaume Vila, who ran the Tolosa gymnasium, turned him down when Gamper asked him to formalise a team from its members who already played informally.

But Gamper didn't give up. He turned instead to Francesc Sole, owner of a rival gymnasium that doubled as the headquarters of the Catalan Gymnastics Federation and home to a modest weekly publication. Sole was receptive to the idea, and Gamper was offered space to place a notice in the magazine's back page.

The advert was brief and riddled with errors. His name was spelt as 'Kans Kamper' and football spelt 'foot-vall'. It simply asked anyone with an interest in the sport to get in touch, noting he could be found at the magazine offices on Tuesday and Friday evenings between 9pm and 11pm. Contemporary press coverage of football at the time was sparse enough that articles often had to explain that the sport had to be struck through a wooden gate.

Despite the sloppy setting, the ad worked. A follow-up note in Los Deportes a month later confirmed Gamper had made real progress organising a football society, with a match set for that same afternoon. Ten days after that, Gamper and 10 other men, gathered at the sole Gymnasium and formally founded Football Club Barcelona.

Los Deportes was a modest weekly tied to Barcelona's gymnastics scene, publishing sports notices and results for the city's small but growing athletic community. It became one of the most reproduced documents in football history.

Here is the ad as it originally appeared, in both Spanish and English.

> "Nuestro amigo y compañero Mr. Kans Kamper, de la sección de Foot-Vall de la Sociedad Los Deportes y antiguo campeón suizo, deseoso de poder organizar algunos partidos en Barcelona, ruega a cuantos sientan aficiones por el referido deporte se sirvan ponerse en relación con él, dignándose al efecto pasar por esta redacción los martes y los viernes por la noche, de nueve a once."

> "Our friend and colleague Mr Kans Kamper, of the foot-vall section of the Sociedad de Deportes and former Swiss champion, wishing to organise some games in Barcelona, asks anybody with an affection for said sport to get in touch with him and for said purpose to come to our offices on Tuesday or Friday evenings between 9 and 11."

It's a plain piece of writing for something that turned out to be so consequential, with no mention of the club's ambition or identity, just a practical invitation to show up for a kickabout on the right evening. That was enough in the end. Over 100 years later, all three of Catalonia's major sports dailies marked the anniversary by reprinting the notice in full, a nod to how a few words in the back of a magazine became the start of one of the biggest clubs in world football .

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